One of the topics of second COFES 2012 Congress was about the cloud. I want to refer to one of the most interesting quotes related cloud / internet from Alan Kay keynote at COFES 2012: Since its inception (1969) the internet was never shut down/rebooted! Which other system can boast such performance? Alan Kay at #COFES2012
Since its inception (1969) the internet was never shut down/rebooted! Which other system can boast such performance? Alan Kay at #COFES2012
— Christian DE NEEF (@cdn) April 13, 2012
The discussion during the second-day Congress was moderated by Brad Holtz and Monica Schnitger. In my view, it was one of the most interesting discussions during COFES 2012.
Below, I put few tweet messages from #COFES2012 twitter stream that can give you some reflection on what was going on.
#COFES2012 open mike discussing: Think Cloud is insecure? Think about people walking out with your data on USB drives. — KennethwongSF (@KennethwongSF) April 14, 2012
38% of companies in my #COFES2012 engineering sw market survey say new cloud offerings will increase overall market for PLM/BIM
— Jim Brown (@jim_techclarity) April 14, 2012
Cloud is a platform, just as Win 32 was. Win 32 brought remarkable change; the cloud will too. — Mike Payne. #cofes2012 — Randall S. Newton (@GfxSpeakRSN) April 14, 2012
#COFES2012 Cloud discussing gets stormy: “some might be forced to retire.”
— KennethwongSF (@KennethwongSF) April 14, 2012
Quote from Mike Payne (thanks @monica_schnitge!) The cloud is a platform. #COFES2012 — Bruce McCallum (@BruceMcCallum) April 14, 2012
Comment: Cloud will bring collaboration revolution. #cofes2012
— Randall S. Newton (@GfxSpeakRSN) April 14, 2012
In my vew: cloud scary people to death. Mostly coz it is new and unknown. especially if / when it becomes the mainstream. #cofes2012 — olegshilovitsky (@olegshilovitsky) April 14, 2012
Unidentified comment: Cloud will disintermediation most of the vendors in this room.” #cofes2012
— Randall S. Newton (@GfxSpeakRSN) April 14, 2012
Another cloud benefit is getting away from administering apps and db on individual machines. Like the good old mainframe days. #COFES2012 — Jim Brown (@jim_techclarity) April 14, 2012
Cloud: Why? Why Not? How?
I think cloud discussions matured over the past 12-24 months. I can clearly see it in the reaction of companies and vendors. 3-4 years ago, cloud was a promise. Few vendors demonstrated successful solutions using cloud software. Among them Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and few others. The difference cloud made over the past years turned cloud into a platform. This is an important difference we need to mention. When I first started to blog about cloud solutions in PLM, the most frequent question people asked was “why”? With more and more examples of mainstream cloud deployments, it changed into “Why not”? It became obvious when few cloud services such as dropbox and some others became a mainstream. So, the question I can hear now is mostly “How?” to make cloud work in a most efficient way for a specific customer or user situation.
What is my conclusion? Cloud is a new platform. This is the best conclusion for cloud discussion at COFES 2012. Vendors will have to figure out how to make their solution leveraging this new platform and provide value for customers. Cloud platform will require us to rethink many existing concepts. It will relate to quality, speed, price, openness and many others. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
